Welcome to Seeds of South Australia

The Seeds of South Australia database is actively being grown.The goal is to provide images and data for South Australia's approximately 3,500 native plant species.

South Australian Seed Conservation Centre

The South Australian Seed Conservation Centre was established by the Botanic Gardens of Adelaide in 2002. For more than a decade the Centre has been helping to conserve South Australia's threatened plant species and support on ground restoration. So far over 200 million seeds have been collected and stored, including seeds from nearly 75% of the States threatened flora.

Seeds are the primary building blocks that allow landowners and practitioners to restore and revegetate degraded environments. However collection and utilisation of Australian native seeds for this purpose is severely constrained by a limited understanding and poor knowledge base about technologies and fundamentals relating to the seed biology of Australian native plants. It is only within the last 20 years that scientists have discovered the use of smoked water as a germination tool and started to understand the role that fire plays in the natural recruitment process.

Even though there has been significant progress in understanding the seed biology of our plants, the germination requirements for nearly 80% of Australia's native plant species that deposit seeds into the soil remain a mystery. This information needs to be determined and made publicly accessible.

We hope that in time, this resource will help bridge this knowledge gap and can be used to support effective community and industry based restoration projects that are needed to facilitate the re-creation of functional and compositionally sustainable ecosystems across the South Australian landscape.